Wednesday, June 20, 2012

All the ideological eggs in one basket

KJA: "Scientifically Comprehending, Firmly Upholding And Going Beyond Maoism for a New Stage of Communism—Polemical Reflections on 'What Is Maoism?' An Essay by Bernard D'Mello" A wide-ranging response to the article "What Is Maoism?" that appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly from India. D'Mello's article articulates and concentrates a major line in the world today, principally in the form of reconfiguring communism as bourgeois democracy.

Bob Avakian: "The Cultural Revolution in China...Art and Culture...Dissent and Ferment...and Carrying Forward the Revolution Toward Communism" A provocative historical and conceptual overview of what "the Cultural Revolution was seeking to address, and was addressing," while also identifying certain problems in conception and approach. The interview is a kind of laboratory of the new synthesis: providing scientific understanding and appreciation of the Cultural Revolution, the high point of the first stage of communist revolution, and indicating ways in which the next stage of communist revolution can go further and do better. This originally appeared in Revolution newspaper.

Raymond Lotta: "Vilifying Communism and Accommodating Imperialism, The Sham and Shame of Slavoj Žižek's 'Honest Pessimism'" Raymond Lotta's sharp polemic against Slavoj Žižek's "fusillade of distortion of the historical experience of revolution and socialism in the 20th century, accompanied by an egregiously uninformed and unprincipled attack on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism." Slavoj Žižek is an influential public intellectual who is perceived and presented as one of the most radical theorists on communism itself. Lotta begins and ends his piece with a challenge to Žižek to publicly debate these issues. This polemic originally appeared in January 2012 in Revolution newspaper.

"The Current Debate on the Socialist State System"—A Reply by the RCP, USAAn answer to an article by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) [Naxalbari]. This response, from 2006 and appearing publicly for the first time, addresses some critical issues of epistemology and political theory that demarcate the new synthesis of communism from other lines within the broader international communist movement.